Behavior Trees - Benefits, Advantages

Benefits, Advantages

As a behavior modelling representation, Behavior Trees have a number of significant benefits and advantages:

• They employ a well-defined and effective strategy for dealing with requirements complexity, particularly where the initial needs of a system are expressed using hundreds or thousands of requirements written in natural language. This significantly reduces the risk on large-scale projects.
• By rigorously translating then integrating requirements at the earliest possible time they provide a more effective means for uncovering requirements defects than competing methods.
• They employ a single, simple notation for analysis, specification and to represent the behavior design of a system.
• They represent the system behavior as an executable integrated whole.
• They build the behavior of a system out of its functional requirements in a directly traceable way which aids verification and validation.
• They can be understood by stakeholders without the need for formal methods training. By strictly retaining the vocabulary of the original requirements this eases the burden of understanding.
• They have a formal semantics, they support concurrency, they are executable and they can be simulated, model-checked and used to undertake failure mode and effects analysis.
• They can be used equally well to model human processes, to analyse contracts, to represent forensic information, to represent biological systems, and numerous other applications. In each case they deliver the same benefits in terms of managing complexity, and seeing things as a whole. They can also be used for safety critical systems, embedded systems and real-time systems.